HourBill Manual

HourBill uses an in-application help system, which can be accessed in full by tapping any of the 'Settings'
buttons and setting 'Maximum Help' to ON. Thereafter
you can obtain help for any feature by tapping the nearest 'info button' (i in a circle) or by
contacting us directly via the email link in the 'Help' screen, which you can get to by tapping the 'Help'
button at the bottom of the Starting Keypad or 'All' Accounts screens.

Email from users sent via the in-app email link tends to be somewhat terse. If you are sending us a
bug report, we often need more information. We prefer that
bug reports be sent via a desktop or
laptop email application.

In the in-app 'Help' screen there is also an 'Online Documentation' button, which takes you to a
landing page on our Web site that currently has no content and redirects to this page.
We consider that page to be part of the app.

Any suggestions about how we can improve the documentation, or any other suggestions about how to improve
the app, are more than welcome. We'd love to hear from you at
support@thorjupitersoftware.com.

More About Bug Reports

If you find a bug in the app, or something that you think doesn't look right, please let us know.
Together we can walk thru the issue, and when we can reproduce it as a problem, the turnaround
time for incorporating the fix into the next update is going to be at most a day or so, typically, if we can
maintain good communications.
There have been occasions when the turnaround time from receiving a bug report
for an app to submitting an update
to fix it has been less than an hour.
(This does not include the time it takes Apple to approve the update,
over which we have little control.)

Often you will see people commenting in the reviews for an app on the App Store, where there is a
problem, or what features should be added, or what is lacking, etc. That's not the right channel.
We have absolutely no way to contact you to fix things or get more details if you take this approach,
and we are obsessed with getting things right and making you happy.
You should contact us directly here, you will
find us to be very responsive. That's the way to make things happen.

About The Crash Reports That Apple Sends Us

In iOS 7, if you go to the Settings app, tap 'General', then tap 'About', scroll to the
bottom and tap 'Diagnostics & Usage', you will see that you have a choice between 'Automatically Send'
and 'Don't Send'. The first choice is the default. Some people change this. We ask you, please don't!
This controls whether or not Apple sends us crash reports when something goes wrong with our apps.
If you turn off automatic sending of crash reports, it severely limits our ability to help you if
there is a malfunction somewhere, whether you've contacted us about it or not.

There is no user-identifiable information in those reports, as you can see by scrolling through the
'Diagnostic & Usage Data' at the bottom of that screen. There are only geeky petroglyphs that allow
us to pin down the approximate location and context, within our computer code, of where the
bug bit.

Somebody Asked These Questions

What is HourBill's privacy policy?

Your backup files are stored in your personal Google (gmail) account, in an encoded form that
is only readable in any meaningful way by HourBill.

It has come to our attention that there are other apps in the App Store, claiming to do something
similar to what HourBill does, that require you to provide your email address to the developer
before allowing you to access basic
functionality such as backing up your data. HourBill has no such requirement.

HourBill needs your gmail address and password in order to access the Google Docs functionality
that is a free service accompanying your gmail account. That address and password are stored in
the Keychain (256-bit encrypted) on your device. Transmission of backups to and from
Google's server network is similarly encrypted.
The entire backup/restore transaction is between you and your password-protected
gmail account, with that level of security. In no way does ThorJupiter Software or any
agent thereof play any intermediary role. It's totally between you and your gmail account.

It's important for us to point out that there is no connection whatsoever between the
gmail address that you provide to the app for the purpose of using HourBill's backup feature,
and whatever email functionality you are using in the Mail application on your device. Many
people have multiple email addresses (we have dozens of them for testing.) Nobody cares
if you set up a new gmail account for the sole purpose of using HourBill's backup functionality.

The Undo/Redo buttons don't always appear.

The Undo/Redo buttons only appear in an Account/Invoice screen, or an Entry screen, if
there is something to Undo or Redo, i.e. after you have begun editing the content of
the screen.

If you've finished editing the content of one of these screens, by tapping the Cancel/Done
buttons or backgrounding the app, the Undo/Redo buttons will no longer be present, because
the data in the screen has been committed. In particular, backgrounding the app is treated
as equivalent to having tapped Done (in order for you to not have lost data if the app
backgrounds due to a time-out, for example.)

HourBill won't let me add an email address to Export to.

In the 'Export' screen, there is a 'Change Address' button that allows you to
select an email address from your Contacts to export to. If this has been blocked,
proceed as follows.

Go to Apple's Settings app, and tap on Restrictions. In the Privacy
section, tap on Contacts. Select Allow Changes, and set the row for HourBill
to be ON.

How this ever got turned OFF, we don't know, at least for HourBill. We are the sweetest
most innocent app there ever was.

Who are you guys?

Is HourBill a cloud-based application?

No. HourBill is built around a SQL database stored on your device. In a sense, HourBill is the
front-end, and our SQL manager is the kernel. We've gone to great lengths to design the app for
maximal stability and safety of your data. Even if the front-end were to experience a malfunction
of some sort, there are multiple layers of internal protection and correction, and you likely
wouldn't notice, nor would your data be affected. This is very important to us.

There are internal backup systems in the app itself, that kick in automatically in the case of
recoverable faults, restoring data from files on your device. You will probably never notice.

Backups that you control are stored in the cloud (Google Docs). Take this feature and
use it well. Regular off-site backups are always a winner.

I chose 'Auto-Backup', but the app doesn't back up every time I start it.

HourBill's data is stored as a SQL database. If you've set 'Auto-Backup' to ON, an automatic
backup will be performed whenever the app starts,
i.e. comes to the foreground, provided that the data in the database
has changed since the last time it was backed up, whether that previous backup was automatic
or manual (tapping the 'Backup Now' button.) This reduces identical backups that would be caused
by starting the app just to "look at something". BTW, because the app's Settings are also stored
in the database, changing your Settings (in any of the Settings screens) also qualifies as
changing your data.

Tapping the 'Backup Now' button proceeds with immediate network backup regardless of whether
the database has changed since the last backup.

Why does HourBill 'Auto-Backup' on start, instead of sending its
backup file on close of the app?

It boils down to reliability. If HourBill, on detecting that there is some
change to the database that
needs to be protected/saved/backed-up, requested a network backup on app quit,
there is no guarantee that there would be time to make that happen,
in the short time that iOS allows us.

The backup feature doesn't work for me.

HourBill backup needs your gmail username (e.g. declanfarber@gmail.com) and password, in order
to access the Google Docs feature of your gmail account, which is where its backups are stored.
HourBill requires the "@gmail.com" (or some other Google-based domain
name) in your username. The password may also be case-sensitive.

See our above Privacy Statement for how this is between you and your gmail account. There are
no intermediaries (except for the Internet pipeline between your device and Google's servers,
and that's encrypted.) We have no way of facilitating this transaction.

To set up your gmail account, if you don't already have one, there are instructions you can
access from the info button (i in a circle) that appears on the Backup screen in the app.

Once all of that is set up, you should make sure that you can log into your gmail account from
your desktop or laptop computer using that username and password.
Sometimes if you have a gmail account
and try to log into your account repeatedly from any device with an incorrect or incomplete
username/password, Google will suspend the account until you log into your account directly on
(for example) www.gmail.com on a desktop or laptop computer and correctly answer a "Captcha"
(you know, where you have to identify the distorted letters you see.) Then they will
automagically un-suspend the account, because you've convinced them that you're not a bot.
You should be able to use the gmail account on that computer - if you can't, then
it's something beyond our control.

Further help to follow, if there is ever more than the one person to have contacted us about
this (and that case seems to have been resolved.) We have been testing backups of HourBill
to Google Docs every which way from Sunday since it was first released three years ago,
and we stand by how reliable it is.

The Settings screen contents change.

HourBill currently has two Settings screens, one reachable from the 'All' screen that
lists all of your Accounts and Invoices, and the other from the screen which lists all of
the Entries for a particular Account or Invoice. The first is
for user preferences that apply to the app as a whole, and the second is for user preferences
that apply to an individual Account or Invoice.
The latter has some buttons that allow preferences for
that individual Account to be applied to all other Accounts as well.

The only elements common to all of the Settings screens are the 'Maximum Help'
and 'Pause Starting Keypad' buttons, which are there for your convenience.

How do I quit the app?

This is not specific to HourBill, this is general troubleshooting.

When you are using an app (such as HourBill) and tap the Home button, the app moves to the
background, but is still "alive". If you double-tap the Home button, you'll see a left-right
scrollable view of all of your "sleeping" apps. Scroll to the app you want to quit, and
flick upwards on the presented screen for it. It will be terminated.

Do you have any plans to use Dropbox?

Yes.

HourBill Update Notes

HourBill 3.1.1

resolved an issue where Phrases may have been duplicated after Restoring under
certain conditions.

enhanced internal error correction in the Phrases software.

refined scrolling of multi-line Phrases in the Phrase edit screen.

in a DayView in the case of Account-ordering-by-last-date, the Account picker
for a new Entry now auto-scrolls to the most recent such Account.

some clarifications in the onboard documentation.

Bug and crash reports for HourBill 3.1.1 have dropped off to virtually nothing.
HourBill 3.1.1 is what we can call "maximally stable". We would be delighted if
anyone can come up with anything else that we need to fix or deal with.
Thank you to our testing team, you are maniacs, and we LOVE you!

HourBill 3.1

New features:

unlimited remote backups going back in time. For example, if you make a backup of the
app data today, you can access that backup at any time in the future, Restore
to it, and then Restore back to the future state of the app, no matter what
happened in the interim. Every backup remains available as a Restorable snapshot.

you can now add a new Entry directly to the set of Entries for a given day
in the DayView calendar view.

Mode (start/end, duration or expense) and Account selection can now be changed
directly by tapping on the starting-keypad display.

Account and Invoice Entry rows may now show the day names along with the dates.

Repairs:

eliminated a crash caused by trying to delete an Entry that did not yet exist.

resolved an issue where DayView would sometimes give the wrong number of
Entries for a given date, when swapping back and forth between backup files.

fixed a sometimes-bug with display of time durations in 'round up for all' mode
when display Modes are switched after the fact (nothing here ever affected
the database.)

fixed a rare bug which caused a crash when the screen was changed before scrolling
of a table or text view had completed, under certain pathological circumstances.

minor changes to the confirmation dialogs and the documentation.

graphical refinements.

squashed other bugs too small to see.

HourBill 3.0.1

fixed a crashing bug associated with changing email addresses.

HourBill 3.0

HourBill has been reconfigured to be iOS 7 native, and now requires iOS 7.

fixed an issue where the app would crash if the user tried to Unlock the
app before the App Store returned with pricing information.

Unlocked (paid) version:

refinements to paid-content detection for Restore Purchase.

fixed a sometimes-bug with display of time durations in 'round up for all' mode.

fixed an issue where you could crash the app by literally deleting a CSV setting.

fixed a condition where the PIN keypad info button would sometimes not lead to the
correct help screen.

HourBill 2.0

Free version:

more possible minimum time increments: 30m, 15m, 10m, 5m, 3m and 36s (military time,)
selectable for each Account separately, in addition to 1m and 6m.

new Expense mode, can add Account Entries corresponding to expenses.

added manual Invoice action to create an Invoice from the current data in an Account.

added automatic Invoice scheduler to invoice Accounts automatically in the background
on a monthly, bimonthly, biweekly or weekly schedule starting on a chosen day; this
used to be in the Unlocked (paid) version.